Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  He carefully placed a thin gold disk on top of a smaller circular wax tablet, taking great pains to align its design with the marks scratched on the surface. Then he placed a little crystal ball at the center of it. Edie thought it would roll off, but there was an almost inaudible “snik” as he let go, as if a magnet had been engaged. It not only stayed in the dead center of the arrangement, but rotated slowly as it did so.

  The Walker exhaled in satisfaction and turned his attention to the black mirror sandwiched between the two larger wax disks. He retrieved gloves from his pockets and put them on. He lifted the top disk and placed it on the edge of the desk, close to Edie. He picked the mirror off the second disk, holding it gingerly by the handle and placing it on top of the disk that was inches from her bare hands.

  She felt the black surface suck at her hand, so strongly that her hand began to move toward it without her thinking. When she did think, and tried to pull her hand back, it was with an effort that had her gritting her teeth at its intensity.

  The Walker saw this and nodded.

  “It’s strong. Touch it.”

  She shook her head, horrified at the way the shiny blackness was pulling at her hand.

  The Walker came around the table and pushed her closer to the edge of the desk. The blackness dragged her hand across the rough wood toward it. She dug her fingernails in, but it did no good.

  She had no idea what was in the stone, but its pull was far stronger than any other she’d ever glinted. She couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of terror or pain she would experience when her hand completed its inexorable journey toward the mirrored surface, but she knew it would be worse than anything she had ever experienced.

  With a final effort, she threw her whole body weight backward, and her feet lashed out, sending a dusty pile of papers skittering over the floor. But it was no use. The black mirror suddenly seemed to exert a stronger pull in reaction, and her hand flipped across the arm of the chair and slapped open-palmed across the center of the mirror, splayed like a white starfish on a plate of ink.

  The jolt of contact detonated through her body and out into the room, sending a silent shock wave through the layers of dust, blowing them into the air all around her. It blew out the candle, too, and for an instant all was as black as the mirror. Then there was the scrape of a match, and the Walker relit the candle and coughed at the airborne dust. Edie did too.

  And as she did so, she noticed an extraordinary thing.

  She wasn’t glinting.

  Not as she had previously experienced glinting.

  The past was not slicing into her in jagged shards of recorded pain.

  Normally, glinting tore at her and left no room for thought until it was over. This was different, and it didn’t immediately hurt. She could notice things—like it not hurting, for example.

  The treacherous instant of surprise and relief lasted about as long as the match in the Walker’s hand. Then she realized this was worse.

  She wasn’t feeling the past in the stone.

  She was feeling nothing.

  Absolutely nothing.

  The stone was not a recorder of past pain. Whatever it had been used for, whatever it had witnessed had gone into it and out into the void beyond. And touching that void was purely terrifying. It was as if Edie were touching the exact opposite of everything in the world around her, because everything around her was something: whereas everything at the end of her hand, sucking at her splayed fingers, was nothing.

  It was such an alien feeling that, given the choice between it and the foulest, most terrifying person that had ever lived, without a second’s thought she’d have taken the side of the human monster and not what was touchable through the mirror. The void stripped everything down to a very simple equation—human or inhuman.

  What was at the end of her hand was the possibility of something so vastly, cosmically bad that she couldn’t begin to get her head around it, and didn’t want to.

  “You feel it,” said the Walker.

  “It’s evil,” she whispered.

  “It’s just different.” He smiled. “The world is full of people who are too stupid to understand, and use words like ‘evil’ and ‘unholy.’ It’s a third thing, a way to power that only the cleverest and bravest can take. And it will set me free and let me rule. . . .”

  Edie gasped as something else edged into her consciousness.

  “Can you feel them?” he asked.

  Horribly, she realized she could. The thing about an absence or a void is that it should, by its very nature, be empty. Edie was slowly becoming aware that all around the edges of this black hole at the end of her arm were things like shadows in the dark, shifting and peering at her over the rim of nothingness. She tried to see what they were, but every time she did so her mind and vision just slid off them as they ducked out of sight.

  “Do you see the Presences?” he asked eagerly.

  “No,” she gasped. “But they’re there. . . .”

  “Precisely,” he said exultantly. “Don’t worry. Not yet.

  They can’t come here unless a gate is opened, and for that to happen we would need another mirror to set up the reflections out of which they could step. I had the two mirrors once, but a meddling fool stole one before I had understood how to use them safely, or work out how to contain the Presences within bounds on this side, once they emerged from the emptiness. He thought I was going to unleash the end of days or some such nonsense. . . .”

  He scowled at the memory and pulled his dagger from the chair arm, looking at it before slipping it back in its scabbard on the back of his belt.

  “I caught up with him and gutted him in a field outside the city, but I have never found the twin mirror again, and I have searched this metropolis from top to bottom ever since.”

  He smiled suddenly. In many ways it was much worse than his scowl.

  “And now I have a glint and an Ironhand at one and the same time . . . so I shall cut through the obstacle that I have been blocked by for three centuries and open the gates in the mirrors in one bold slash. . . .”

  With that, he jerked the gold disk out from under the crystal ball so quickly that the crystal was left spinning furiously on the spot just above the wax surface of the protective tablet. In the same movement, he sliced it under Edie’s hand, between it and the black mirror, and as it severed the connection between Edie and the void, she felt a savage, blunt pain as if a limb had just been brutally chopped off. Then her hand was free, and she jerked it off the gold disk with a sob.

  She curled over the pain as her hand twitched like the jerking nerves of a dying fish.

  “There,” he said. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

  It had been so bad that touching the loathsome otherness in the mirror left her feeling shocked to the core of her being. She had just touched something behind the scenes, something that humans were not designed to be conscious of, let alone contact. It hadn’t been pain, but if her hand had been free, she would have taken the dagger and killed the Walker simply for making her touch it.

  “It was worse,” she panted. “It wasn’t like glinting. It wasn’t like touching a stone normally is.”

  “Of course. And part of that is because the mirror is not really stone. Scientists, these new magicians of your age, they say that it’s not a stone at all. It’s obsidian, which looks like a stone but is a kind of glass, a volcanic glass.”

  “It’s a glass. Like—?”

  “Like your precious heart stone, yes. Don’t worry.” He smiled thinly. “Keep it for the moment. You will need all your strength.”

  He waved an arm at all the wrapped bundles of stone on the shelves.

  “I will have you touch all of these pieces of black stone. I have spent a lot of time collecting them, as you can see, in the hope that one day I would be lucky enough to find a master maker and a glint who could tell me which one of these rough items most closely matches the feel of the dark mirror.”

  It all came cle
ar to Edie in one flash of understanding. “You think George can make you a new mirror?”

  “I know he can.”

  “He’s not a stone mason, or anything. He’s just a boy.”

  “It’s not a learned skill. He will feel the shape of what is to be made in the obsidian you choose, and he will know how to bring it forth. It’s not a skill. It’s in his bloodline.”

  She shook her head. “No. He won’t do it for you, even if he does have this ability you think he has. He just won’t do it for you.”

  “He will do it for you,” the Walker said simply. “He will do it to save you.”

  And with a plummeting feeling inside her, she knew he was right.

  He roughly freed her right arm and pointed to the shelves. “I will unwrap these rocks. You will feel them. You will tell me which one feels most like the obsidian mirror. You will glint for me. . . .”

  Edie forced the fear back and tried to think straight. “Okay,” she said. It would buy her time. And now she had one hand free, even if the other was tightly tied to the heavy chair.

  “I have freed your hand so you can reach all three levels of shelf. Do anything other than as I tell you, and I will have the Blind Woman set the dogs on you. Understood?”

  She heard the hungry snuffling of the two mastiffs under the door and nodded. The Walker started along the shelf, unwrapping package after package, revealing black stones of every shape and size.

  “Some of these are obsidian, some are flint. I did not know the difference when I began my collection. Don’t worry about the flints. Just touch the black glass,” he said as he moved away.

  It was the word “flint” that made Edie know what she was going to have to do. She pulled against the strap pinning her to the chopping-board arms of the seat. The strap was only half an inch wide, but there was no question of breaking it. She would have to bide her time until it was the moment to act. All would depend on the Walker’s being in the right place.

  “Go on, then,” he said.

  She took a breath and touched the nearest slab of rock. It was about the same size as a roughly hewn telephone directory.

  She jerked slightly as the memory in it flowed into her.

  A weeping red-haired woman in a green coat sat in the chair Edie was sitting in.

  She clutched a blazing heart stone that was pinned to her lapel as a brooch.

  She had big hair, like an astronaut’s wife in a 1960s newsreel.

  Her thick mascara was running.

  She screamed as the Walker reached in and ripped the heart stone out of her hand and off her jacket.

  Edie convulsed as she felt the irreparable wave of anguish tear into the older woman as it was taken.

  She heard the Walker say:

  “Try another one, and you shall have your dainty back.”

  Then the vision of the past was over, and it was she who was strapped to the chair. She tried to understand what she had just seen.

  “You have had other glints testing these rocks.”

  He nodded. “Ignore the memories of them. Their pain is . . . a minor distraction. Find me the rock with the possibility of a gate in it. Try them all.”

  He tapped the dagger handle.

  “Try to thwart me by choosing the wrong one, and I will open the boy in front of your eyes and you can watch his life puddle away through the cracks in these very floorboards.”

  “But why do you need me if you’ve already had others test the stones?” she asked, in a final attempt to stave off the inevitable.

  “Because the nature of the void in the mirror changes in time. It’s as if whatever is beyond the gate in the mirror moves. As if it has been floating loose since it was separated from the second mirror. Two of them together seemed to hold each other steady. The uncut stone that was a match for the mirror ten years ago won’t be right now. That’s why having a glint and a master maker on hand at the same time is so very fortuitous.”

  She nodded slowly, turned, and felt the next stone. And the one after.

  So began the longest hour of Edie’s life. Most of the stones held at least one anguish-soaked memory of an earlier glint, sometimes more than one. She lost track of the pain and the faces in a mounting accretion of despair as she dragged her wheeled chair after her, trying stone after stone. The pain didn’t make her numb. It just went on and on, wearing different faces that all blurred together. She began to feel she couldn’t breathe, as though she were drowning in a never-ending sea of tears.

  Eventually she became so punch-drunk that she just assumed this was going to go on forever. Only the closeness of the heart stone in her pocket kept her going, because in her mind it was where she’d hidden her last hope, her one desperate plan for escape, a plan that could only happen when everyone was in the right place. It was so unending, this onslaught of women’s and girls’ despair that when she came to the empty stone, she wept with relief.

  He didn’t have to ask her if it was the one. He just looked up from where he was bent over the desk, and smiled.

  “Good.”

  Edie leaned against the shelf as the Walker reached past her and took the slab over to the table. As soon as he walked away, her hand closed on the obsidian next to the place where the empty one had been.

  She checked that he was still moving away. And once he was at the desk, carefully putting the empty stone next to the dark mirror, she took a fast deep breath and closed her eyes.

  She lifted the heavy slab and smashed it down on the stone on the shelf.

  She heard a sharp cracking noise and felt chips of rock fly past her face.

  Something stung her ear, but she ignored it and opened her eyes.

  Sure enough, the obsidian had shattered, leaving fine shards all over the shelf.

  “What are you doing?” the Walker shouted, and the noise started the dogs on the other side of the door barking furiously. Edie didn’t spare a millisecond to see if he was going to get to her before she did what she had to do. Her free hand darted into the stone debris and grabbed a long, thin shard like a straight razor. It was the wrong way around, but she spun it in her hand in midair so the blade edge faced out as she slashed it at her trapped wrist.

  The obsidian blade, sharper than the sharpest scalpel, seemed to whistle as it cut through the air and hit the taut rope, severing it almost as if it weren’t there at all.

  Without pausing, she kept the momentum of her slash going and rolled out of the chair, spinning to her feet and whirling the heavy wooden seat on its wheels so that it was between her and the approaching Walker.

  He was diving forward, and hit the solid chair hard, knocking it off its wheels as he tangled in it and fell. Edie jumped out of the way as he and the chair crashed to the floor.

  The candle on the table fell over with the impact, but it didn’t go out. It rolled in among some of the loose sheets of paper that Edie had disturbed.

  The Walker managed to reach one hand out and grab the edge of her jacket. His normally sneering face was crimson with rage and pain.

  “You will pay, you little hellcat!” he shouted in a voice like a thunderclap, dragging her toward him.

  “You too—” said Edie calmly.

  And with all the power and cold fury in her body, she slashed the obsidian razor across his face.

  “—And don’t call me little.”

  She didn’t wait as he screamed and his hands flew to his eyes.

  She vaulted over his hunched body, ran across the room, grabbed another big lump of stone from the nearest shelf, so heavy that she could hardly lift it, and with the last of her strength, hurled it through the leaded diamonds of the window. Snow billowed into the room as she jumped out into the night without a second’s hesitation.

  The only thought she had time for as she fell through the air was that, for all she knew, she was going to break her neck; but anything was better than what was in that room, pulling from the black mirror.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Chimes at Midnight<
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  George clenched the horsewhip in his hand and braced his back against the Portland stone stacked massively behind him. He had a thousand questions that he wanted to ask the Officer, but before he could think which one to call out, he heard the sound of a deep familiar bell tolling, reverberating high in the night air.

  It was the sound of Big Ben, marking the turn of the day from its position three hundred feet above the city. Though he had heard the old bell on the radio marking the hours before news broadcasts, now that George was hearing it directly through the night air, it felt like the first time.

  He heard the warning carillon ring one, two, three, four times, and then after a pregnant pause, he heard the majestic lonely bongs of the great bell counting out the hours. And as he listened, he thought of something his dad used to say when they’d return home after an adventure or a treat of some kind. He’d look rueful and tousle George’s hair and, no matter what time of day it actually was, he’d say, “Well, we did that, didn’t we? We heard the chimes at midnight.”

  The memory faded as George became aware of something else.

  With each bong, he felt himself changing. And not only himself, but his surroundings. As the darkened city paled into a harsh winter light, he felt his body stiffen and become more ponderous. He wondered fleetingly if he was turning into a statue. His feet felt massy and increasingly clumsy, and his clothes seemed to become heavier. And then not only heavier, but less comfortable. They scratched and itched at him. And then he forgot his clothes and the heaviness as he focused on what was happening to the four-story white stucco building opposite. With each sound of the bell, it was fading, and in its place was a clear sky seen through a lattice of black-and-white silver birch trees. There were no leaves on the slender trunks and branches, and George felt a chill breeze cut through him. As he instinctively reached to fasten the plastic buttons on his reefer jacket, his hands met stiff tarpaulin canvas, metal buttons, and leather straps. He looked down in time to see the dark bronze rectangle of the plinth fade away and leave his boots standing on a muddy crisscross of wheel tracks punctuated by hoof marks.